The Anarchist
Opening Night: December 2, 2012
Closing: December 16, 2012
Theater: Golden Theatre
Passion. Deception. Religion. Revolution. These thrilling topics and more are brought to light in the world premiere of this provocative two-hander by David Mamet. Two-time Tony Award winner Patti LuPone, will go head-to-head with three-time Oscar nominee Debra Winger, as two powerful women forced to engage in a cage match of wits. Mamet, who brought a fierce sense of pace and entertainment to the direction of his own Race, will be at the helm of this theatrical event.
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December 2, 2012
They sure talk fancy in the clink these days. “The Anarchist,” the heavily embroidered slip of a play now at the Golden Theater, takes place in a women’s penitentiary, a setting that has been used memorably for many a lurid fiction. The show’s stars (and entire cast) are Patti LuPone and Debra Winger, performers celebrated for generating sparks onstage and on screen. And its author is David Mamet, king of the explosive expletive.
READ THE REVIEWDecember 2, 2012
If the prospect of Patti LuPone and Debra Winger in a two-character prison play by David Mamet conjures some deliriously pulpy women-behind-bars satire, forget it.
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December 2, 2012
Some actors are more commanding than others when grappling with the exacting rhythms of David Mamet’s clipped dialogue. Patti LuPone, who collaborated with the playwright on The Old Neighborhood in 1997 and in a number of other plays and films, is a natural. Debra Winger, making her Broadway debut, is still finding her way. But the far greater problem with The Anarchist is that this aridly intellectual two-hander – which clocks in at a mere 65 minutes and has been loftily described by Mamet as “a Talmudic argument” – is desiccated, dull and virtually without drama.
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December 2, 2012
The Weathermen and their “Days of Rage” in 1969 emerged from the dimly remembered past during the 2008 presidential campaign when fevered attempts were made by Republicans the Republican Party to closely link Barack Obama with Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn Bernadette Doren and Judy Clark, who were involved in those violent events in Chicago. More than four years later, these are generally regarded on both sides of the aisle as tired lines of attack and, self-evidently, they did not keep Obama from winning the White House, twice. David Mamet, though, clearly remains engaged — heck, enraged — by the ability of the former members of the Weather Underground Oorganization to rehabilitate themselves and find a measure of absolution from an American public that has moved on, as the American public usually tends to do.
READ THE REVIEWDecember 2, 2012
David Mamet’s new play The Anarchist is not so much a drama about specific people in a narrative arc as a short, brittle, stripped-down debate-club exercise on a stopwatch, pitched to Baby Boomers who remember the destructive handiwork of the radical Weather Underground in 1970. The fictional anarchist here is Cathy (Patti LuPone, playing, we are to assume, someone who has no relation to notorious Weather Underground members Kathy Boudin or Cathy Wilkerson), who seeks parole after serving 35 years of an open-ended sentence for the politically motivated killing of a police officer.
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